The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses a combination of orbiting satellites to determine position coordinates. GPS works great in most outdoor areas, but the satellite signals are not strong enough to penetrate inside most indoor environments. As a result, new indoor positioning technologies that make use of 802.11 wireless LAN's are beginning to appear on the market.
Indoors positioning typically requires the implementation for each hardware vendor used, or deployment of specialized equipment that integrates with the network. Solutions known to Applicant are based on measuring of signal strengths of (or signal travel time to) access points and triangulation, or on adding hardware components to the access points so that the system can detect which hardware component the network traffic goes through. Different such solutions of this kind are disclosed in WO02/054813 A1 (EKAHAU), WO02/058267 A2 (BLUESOFT), WO02/058290 A1 (BLUESOFT), and WO02/058346 A2 (BLUESOFT).